23 Work-at-Home Jobs With a Steady Income (No Phone Needed)

If your dream gig is one that you can do from the confines of your own home, you may be in luck.

The work-at-home job market has exploded in recent years, thanks to the rapid advancement of digital technologies that make it easier than ever to work in almost any field from almost anywhere in the world. And all it takes to cash in on this fast-growing work-at-home market is knowing where to look.

Whether you’re searching for a flexible, part-time gig, full-time work, or even a position with a Fortune 500 company, the opportunities are not only out there — they’re endless.

Here are 23 great ways to begin a new career, or find flexible, part-time work, from the comfort of your own home. (Or better yet, poolside…)

Top Non-Phone Work-at-Home Jobs of 2019

#1 — Getting paid to read

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $20 to $30 per hour

Summary: Do you have a flair for catching other people’s mistakes? If so, you possess a valuable skill — and you should cash in on it. You’ll not only be earning decent money through proofreading, but you’ll also be performing an important service by helping clean up and improve everything from blog posts to academic journal articles.

#2 — Online focus groups

You’re not going to become rich filling out surveys — and that’s OK. It can still be a decent source of side income.

The surveys aren’t hard to fill out (and sometimes they’re even fun).

After you sign up for a survey site, you’ll receive an email notification when there is a survey available to take. For example, here’s an opportunity I recently received that paid $50 for a 10-minute survey (these are rare but do exist):

Survey Junkie is widely-recognized by survey takers as one of the best survey sites around. This site has the highest rating on TrustPilot of all survey sites, as well as an “A” rating with the Better Business Bureau.

#3 — Bookkeeping

Experience needed: There is no certification required to take on bookkeeping clients. However, apprenticing under a successful bookkeeper, or taking a training course, can help you land your first client.

Average pay: $20 to $40 per hour

Entrepreneur Magazine recently listed bookkeeping as America’s most profitable business. That should come as no surprise, considering bookkeepers are vital to all small businesses.

Whether you just want to do it at home a few hours a week or cobble together a whole career, bookkeeping might be what you’re looking for.

You’ll need some general accounting skills to help you maintain financial records. However, there’s no certification needed (like being a CPA). But because bookkeepers are used by so many businesses, finding work can be quite easy.

To begin a virtual bookkeeping business, learn the ropes from Ben Robinson, who used to own a CPA firm and now teaches others how to launch their own bookkeeping side hustles.

#4 — Make money from the photos on your hard drive and phone

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $15 to $25 per hour

The business of selling stock photos is expected to exceed $4 billion by 2020, according to Technavio.

If you’re not familiar with how stock photo sites work, the photos for sale are uploaded by thousands of people just like you. When someone buys a photo you uploaded, you get a percentage of the sale price.

The goal is to have around 100 sales a day, with each sale generating around $1 in revenue. If you were able to do that, you’d have an income of $3,000 per month.

Not only is this steady income, it’s also a source of passive income. Once you upload a photo, it can be purchased over and over again.

You may have photos right now on your phone or hard drive that could be making you money.

How Creative Live works is that their live classes are 100 percent free. Then, if you want to be able to watch the video recordings on-demand, you have to pay a small fee. Currently, they have a stock photography course for just $29.

Liz has a great personality and her work as a social media manager has appeared in places like CNN, The Ellen Degeneres Show, and Entrepreneur. If you’re looking to laugh, plus have the opportunity to learn a valuable set of skills, check out her free webinar here.

#8 — Virtual assistant (VA)

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $20 to $40 per hour

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were over 35,000 non-employer businesses that earned between $1 million and $2.49 million in revenue in 2015. That was a 33% increase over the previous measurement. The next time the data is released, I fully expect the numbers to be even higher.

A non-employer business is a business that has no full-time employees. Instead, many hire independent contractors to handle a variety of roles for the company.

A catch-all term for this role is a virtual assistant. As a virtual assistant, you handle schedules, email, customer service, posting on social media — a little bit of anything and a little bit of everything. Some VAs have three to five clients and are able to earn six figures for their efforts.

#9 — Customer Service Representative (CSR)

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $12 to $25 per hour

Becoming a customer service agent used to mean spending hours on the phone in a call center. However, the trend in customer care is to offer both phone and text-based support — otherwise known as live chat.

The pros of starting a career in home customer service include:

Taking advantage of a growing trend

The opportunity to land consistent work

Starting pay that’s higher than other data-entry work

If you’re interested, websites like Arise and Capital Typing work as staffing agencies that help companies fill live-chat jobs.

#10 — Freelance writing

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $20 to $40 per hour (or more)

If you love to do research and write about new things, freelance writing will be right up your alley.

Each writing job will bring new topics for you to learn and write about. Whether you’re an experienced writer or a newbie, breaking into this career is relatively easy. It just might take some persistence before you land your first assignment and find your niche.

What’s also great about freelance writing is that you can work with clients on retainer. For example, you can have four clients, each paying you $1,000 to write for them.

One trend in the work-at-home jobs marketplace is crowdsourcing. Chances are you’ve experienced crowdsourcing in the past, as it’s the business model of companies like Uber and Lyft.

The idea of crowdsourcing is to enlist a large number of people to provide a specific good or service. In Uber’s case, that service is transportation. For a company like GrubHub, it’s food delivery.

The idea has spread to all kinds of business models. The common thread is that these industries involve a lot of simple, repetitive work.

This makes the jobs ideal for entry-level workers. While the pay isn’t great, the work can be consistent and the hours are flexible.

If you’re interested in getting started, here are six different services you can provide, along with the best websites to start with.

#1 — Transcription

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $10 to $25 per hour

Transcribing allows you to earn money by converting audio or video files to text. The demand for this service has grown significantly of late, thanks largely to the emergence of podcasters looking to transcribe their episodes to use as blog posts.

While the pay can be low for entry-level work, there are specialties that allow you to increase your value in the marketplace. The transcriptionists who earn the most specialize in medical or legal transcription. Depending on who you work for, there are some requirements or certifications the are necessary when you get this level.

Two good resources to check out are:

Free Intro to Scoping: Scoping is a term used for legal transcription, where the job is to edit the transcripts of court reporters. In this free mini-course, long-time scopist Linda Evenson shows you how to earn a full-time income by working just part-time as a scopist.

Transcription Foundations: Learn how to get started in medical transcription from Janet Shaughnessy, who began working as a medical transcriber in 2007 and now runs a medical transcription business of her own.

If you’re looking to join a crowdsourcing platform to start making money as a general transcriptionist, the most popular site is Rev.

#2 — Data entry

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $5 to $15 per hour

Data entry is one of the most popular crowdsourcing gigs. While there is huge demand for work, there’s also a large supply of workers around the world. As such, it’s one of the lower-paying online jobs on a per-hour basis.

However, because there’s so much demand, this is one job where you can actually get started making money from home today. And if you’re wanting to eventually make more money, you can take the skills you’re learning and apply them to higher-paying related fields like transcription, freelance writing, or chat jobs.

The most popular crowdsourcing site to get started as data entry clerk is Clickworker.

#3 — Translation

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $10 to $25 per hour

If you’re bilingual, there are many possibilities for earning money online. Translating, customer service, interpretations, data entry, transcription, and localization are among the services sought in this space.

With the valuable skill of speaking two languages, the pay is typically higher than other entry-level jobs in this space, too. One popular translation site to find work on is Gengo.

#4 — Search engine evaluation

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $10 to $15 per hour

The world’s biggest search engines — like Google, Yahoo, and Bing — hire independent contractors to review search results for quality. This position is known as a search engine evaluator.

You get to work when you want, and if you work for the right company you can earn above minimum wage from home.

One downside to becoming a search engine evaluator is that many companies cap the number of hours you can work. This is based on the demand from the search engines for evaluation, which tends to peak after an algorithm change but can slow down shortly thereafter.

#5 — Website tester

Experience needed: None

Average pay: $10 to $20 per hour

Website testing allows you to evaluate and provide feedback on a variety of new websites and designs. For some sites, it’s as simple as clicking on a link and talking out-loud on a recorded line to share your first impressions.

The pay for website testing tends to be higher than other entry-level jobs such as data entry or transcription. Furthermore, this is one work-at-home job available to those all over the world.

To find website testing jobs, check out UserTesting.com, where there are positions available throughout North America, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

Fortune 500 Companies Hiring Full-Time Remote Employees Now

There are dozens of Fortune 500 companies that are hiring full-time virtual employees today. And this is true for everything from entry-level to senior-level positions.

The benefits of working for a larger company typically include benefits such as health insurance, proper training, and the ability to earn more money.

If you do have mid-level to senior-level experience, skip this section and head straight to FlexJobs, a database of screened work-at-home job listings across the United States. (More on them below).

If you’re interested in working for a bigger company, select “Forbes 2000” on FlexJobs — this option lists jobs from the top 2,000 companies worldwide.

The five work-at-home jobs listed below are from Fortune 500 companies and are geared toward entry-level workers. Availability does change frequently. The goal here is to provide you with a small sample size of entry-level opportunities to work for a Fortune 500 company, but you’ll find many others with a little bit of research.

#1 — Dell

Under flexible work opportunities, Dell currently lists over 300 full-time remote jobs. The best opportunity right now for entry-level work at Dell is as an account manager.

#5 — Apple

Best Work-at-Home Job Websites

#1 — FlexJobs

The quickest way to start working from home is simply switching to a company that hires remote workers.

This is easier said than done, especially if you search for a job the traditional way. That’s because for every legit online job on a site like Craigslist, there are many too-good-to-be-true “opportunities.”

Fortunately, the number of companies who hire remote workers is growing. And yes, they offer things like salary, benefits, growth potential, etc… crazy, right?

#2 — Upwork

Upwork is the largest marketplace online for freelance professionals. Thousands of new freelance jobs are posted daily, from small to larger companies looking for just about anything.

If you’re a beginner with no experience, it can be hard to land your first job. One strategy that worked well for me was to include a customized video in my proposal. The video was typically 90 to 120 seconds. In it, I briefly explained why I was a great fit for the role. I’d list the video as “private” on YouTube, then link to it inside my proposal. With this method, I was able to land a writing job that paid over $2,000 in a few weeks’ time.

If you’re not sure how your skills or experience fit this marketplace, some decent jobs to start with include:

Freelance writing

Proofreading

Customer service

#3 — Indeed

Indeed aggregates work-at-home listings from across the web. The quality varies, which is why I prefer a site like FlexJobs. However, there is a lot you can learn from spending some time on Indeed.

The key to using Indeed is to be really specific with your search. As there are a lot of job listings, you can type something like “entry-level work-at-home data entry” and get hundreds of results.

Suggestions for keyword terms to include in your search are:

Remote

Virtual

Work at home

Work from home

Telecommute

Best Work-at-Home Jobs Summary

The fact is that this is just a small sample of the work-at-home opportunities that are available today. This is a fast-growing area in our economy… once which doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon.

About The Author

R.J. Weiss is the founder and editor of The Ways To Wealth, a Certified Financial Planner™, husband and father of three. He's spent the last 10+ years writing about personal finance and has been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, MSN Money, and other publications.

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